Initiatives

Gender and Climate Change

Our work on gender and climate change aims to advance research on gender, justice, and climate change by promoting exchange and collaborations among researchers from various disciplines and regions. Our goals are to catalyze interdisciplinary, collaborative research and to provide information, case studies, and references to assist researchers.

Our areas of concentration include examination of women’s role as agents of change in the context of climate mitigation and adaptation; the significance of gender as well as other relevant differences such as class, race/ethnicity, religion, etc. in understanding and analyzing the impacts of climate change; critical analysis of the types of knowledge that are most effective for gender justice, including experiential knowledge, local knowledge, and scientific knowledge, as well as how to most effectively communicate that knowledge to various stakeholders; examining persistent social inequalities and oppressive structural and institutional practices that result in unjust climate change responses; gender differences in perception of risks related to climate change; and analysis of the ways in which dominant conceptions of femininity and masculinity are implicated within the institutional frameworks of climate policy as well as the societal discourses that structure our understanding of the problems of and the solutions to climate change.